What Is Music?

What Is Music?

Music is an art form that comes from the creation of various sounds through multiple techniques and instruments. Music has the power to show the broad range of human emotions through the use of elements such as rhythm, melody, and harmony. Through those elements, music has the power to match the wide range of emotions that people experience during their life time. For me, music is a creative expression of human emotion.

In music, rhythm plays the most important role in a song. Rhythm essentially represents the heartbeat of the song. It constantly reoccurs throughout the musical piece and creates a sense of timing. That timing created by the rhythm moves the song forward. It also helps determine the length of notes in songs. This is the part of the song that most people end up unknowingly clapping their hands to during concerts or find themselves drumming randomly. Rhythm can portray human emotions through the uses of different beat patterns. A faster rhythm shows more joyful emotions, while a slower rhythm may have the opposite meaning.

Most people recognize the melody of a song, without even knowing the true definition of melody. Melody is a series of notes that end up being the most recognized and repeated parts of a song through the use of phrases. Melodies are the horizontal progressions in songs. In lyrical forms of music, the melody of a song revolves around that one catchy lyric that people just cannot seem to forget. Melodies give song composers the ability to portray different emotions depending on what that composer feels is important to their music.

Harmony also plays a large role. While the melody gets most of the attention, harmony plays more of a background role giving support to the melody. It helps create a vertical progression throughout the song.